Sonatensatz in c

Johannes Brahms composed three violin sonatas between 1878 and 1888, each of which has earned a well-deserved place in the concert repertory. But much earlier in his life, in 1853 to be exact, Brahms participated in a collaborative violin composition with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich, one of Schumann's pupils. Schumann was among the foremost German composers and critics of the day. In late October 1853 Schumann published a seminal article in which he lionized Brahms as the future of German music. The two men had been introduced just weeks earlier by a mutual friend, the famed violinist, Joseph Joachim. At that time Schumann conceived the idea of a tribute sonata for Joachim. The joint project was given the cryptic title FAE Sonata—Schumann relished such musico-poetic riddles—in honor of Joachim's personal motto: Frei aber einsam (free but lonesome).
Each of the movements, of which Brahms contributed the third-movement Scherzo, was to utilize the pitch motive F-A-E in some fashion. Brahms' allusions to the motive are vague at best. Instead he writes a dramatic rondo, whose primary theme (a C-minor tempest) evokes Beethoven in both general mood and specific rhythms. The ominous drumbeat is never far away, even during the two beautiful episodes. Indeed, it is the episodes which betray Brahms' innate lyricism. The balance between poignant earnestness and muscular bravado, a taste for syncopation and hemiola, reverence for classical forms, chromatic progressions that carve out moments of expansiveness within otherwise tight-knit motivic development—so much of the later master seems already manifest in this 20-year-old arrival from Hamburg. One can understand Schumann's comparison of young Brahms to Athena, springing fully armed from the head of Zeus.

(c) Jason Stell